At 7:13 AM 03/31/03, Matthew Hindson Fastmail Acct wrote: >Yes, but in Australia it's still 50 years after the composer's death, and >Bartok died in 1945. > >So putting it on mp3.com.au would be OK, I would assume. Paul, you could >give APRA or AMCOS a call to make sure. I'm sure they'd be only too happy >to help out.
If a work is public domain in Australia but under copyright protection in, say, France, it is still illegal for an Australian publisher to publish the work in France without permission. The Internet complicates this, because it can files posted to the Internet can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Thus, it might reasonably be argued that posting on the Internet on an Australian server still constitutes publication in France. The usual response to this is to have some sort of warning on the web page where the reader has to acknowledge that he or she is in a country where it legal before proceeding. This does nothing to keep out the reader who is willing to ignore the warning and download it anyway, but the presumption is that the infringement is then the responsibility of the reader not the publisher. So far that has been sufficient, but the law remains unsettled -- and it could prove different in different countries -- so as a legal precaution some web publishers are starting to make their gateways a little harder to jump over. There isn't much case law yet for international copyright issues resulting from Internet publishing. With regard to the web publisher's responsibility to keep material away from those who aren't legally allowed to view it, most of the precedent is in analogous cases with obscenity law. (Pornography is the largest category of Internet publishing by far.) Most pornography sites, even the ones that offer material for free, now require a password obtained through an independent age-verification agent. I expect that within a few years a similar scheme will develop for geographic verification. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
